


Empty

by Pseudologia



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Angst, Like, M/M, a fuck-ton of angst, just so you fully understand, trigger warnings in the end notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-04
Updated: 2012-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-15 14:59:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pseudologia/pseuds/Pseudologia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He's read sappy teenage cliches and listened to depressing British pop music about things like this all the time. He's heard people throw the idea around on a daily basis like it's nothing. He should be prepared for what happens next; it's idiotic that he isn't, really, and he'd beat himself up for it relentlessly if that weren't already Plan A.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty

**Author's Note:**

> please see the end notes for trigger warnings which contain spoilers, if you are so inclined.

There's a candlelight vigil in the square, and hundreds upon thousands of people attend. There are masses of swirling, sobbing people releasing their grief into the cold night air as small candles ignite the tears on their faces. There are speeches and stories and, sometimes, there's even a little bit of laughter at a forced fond memory. It's cathartic and it's healing and it's a beautiful way to bring the community together.

 

He stands at the front of the crowd and sits silently through every single speech. He doesn't even dare to look at anyone else gathered there, for fear of their sympathy, their recognition. He fights the urge to scream until he feels blood in his throat and cold snaking around his lungs. He fights the urge to throw things, to hit someone, to call the entire thing off.

 

Nothing to him has ever felt so nauseatingly wrong.

 

\--

 

It's only been a few weeks, but he can't stop himself from being irrevocably pissed off. He can't stop himself from deleting every last contact he has for him, from his phone, his agenda, his e-mail. He cuts him out for good and pretends that he doesn't even want to look back, the desperation of the deposition reverberating through his head like the sickest looping record in existence. He ignores calls and texts until they stop coming in, and it only takes a few days before the process is complete. It only takes a few days to erase years and months; happiness and hurt and _want_. A click of the mouse, a touch of finger to phone, and gone.

 

He wakes up every morning and refuses to look in the mirror, knowing that the only person he really wants to escape from is himself.

 

\--

 

He gets sympathetic cards and e-mails and phone calls and Facebook messages – even the occasional wall post from his less classy acquaintances. He tries to deal with them himself for a week before he realizes he can't do it without dry heaving into his waste basket, desperately choking up bile and waiting for the pain inside his gut to match the pain inside his head.

 

He loses fifteen pounds before he finally pawns the letters off on his secretary.

 

\--

 

It's only December when he gets the call, just a few months after the suit.

 

It's the 27th, and he's just gotten back from faking happiness with the rest of his family and pushing food around his plate; giving and receiving presents that barely even matter. The sense of fragility that his family regards him with is unsettling to the point of frustration, and he ends up spending most of the holiday in his childhood room. He returns home that day in the late afternoon, jet-lagged and cold and no less miserable than when he left. He sits down at his desk and does some aimless paperwork, firing off a note or two to his colleagues to cover some things he might have missed while gone. He knows that everything is at a standstill, anyway – everyone is off enjoying free time with their families – but the methodical rhythm of work is enough to distract him, if only for a couple hours. Around eight, he orders Chinese food and grabs a beer out of the fridge. He falls asleep with the TV on and no recollection as to what he'd spent the past few hours watching.

 

His phone rings around eleven that night.

 

\--

 

They've been sitting in the dark together for a few hours now, trying to sober up enough to write more code and scrape projects together for their Monday classes. They talk idly about programming and professors and what a dick move it is, really, for a frat to throw a party on a Sunday night.

 

It's dark, and they're drunk, and he's wanted to do this for a long, long time; wanted to make him understand exactly how important he is, how much being with him matters -- every second, every minute, every day. All he wants to do is help this person that he values so, so much understand exactly how he feels.

 

And he's equal parts drunk, emotional, and horny as _hell,_ and the lights are out, so his brain says, _Fuck it._

He leans over in the darkness, hands clumsily groping for a jaw or a neck or a shoulder. He feels a nose first, and out of the darkness comes a grunt of amused confusion that hitches into a sudden intake of breath when he moves his hand to rest against his jaw, thumb lightly brushing his cheek.

 

He finally leans in, and their lips somehow connect in the darkness, and it's nice and light and relieving, a mixture of feelings that send his head spinning harder than any alcohol ever had.

 

Just as quickly, he's pulling away, blinking slowly into the darkness, realization crashing over him like a wave. _I'm sorry_ , he calls into the black, _I wasn't--_

But suddenly, a dim outline is drawing closer to him, and a hand is bundled in his shirt, and there's a clanking of beer bottles, the rustle of jeans against a hardwood floor, and lips pressing unashamedly against his. He opens his mouth into the kiss and feels the warmth of a sigh dance over his lips, the roll of a whimper escaping his own. His tongue is rolling against the other, each new movement an attempt to deepen the kiss – to fall into it forever, to get lost in a world where he feels this good; where there is darkness all around him but he can feel light radiating from his every pore.

 

In tandem, their hands are anxious to cover every surface they can, to leave burning impressions without being invasively rough. The hand that was once knotted in his shirt moves up to grip the back of his neck, to pull him closer, and the other gently lifts the hem of his shirt, gently exploring his side. It skims across his hip and he can't help tilting his head back a little, letting out a sudden exhale. His hands have wound around a waist, gripping tight and daring to skim over the waistband of fitted jeans, earning him a soft moan. He moves a hand up slightly to guide the other person over top of him, completely oblivious to the fact that this is all going to happen unceremoniously in the middle of a cold, hardwood floor.

 

He begins to tug at the bottom of the other person's shirt, breaking their kiss to mouth down his neck and collarbone. He's sucking dark red circles into pale, pale skin and the friction of denim on denim is nearly unbearable and God, they're both practically gasping for breath at this point—

 

 Suddenly, the door opens. A glaring shaft of light slices through the velvet black darkness and casts lines across their faces, each wide-eyed and horrified to find that someone has walked right through the doorway.

 

They right themselves and fix their clothes amongst slurred apologies, _Oh, shit,_ and _I'm so sorry, dude_. The door is closed within seconds, but they're both more sober than they'd ever hoped to be. They don't look at each other as they get up off the floor and stumble back out to the hallway, going in separate directions to get back to their dorm.

 

The next morning, he is met with nothing but indifference. Nobody acknowledges the events of last night, so neither does he. He does his best to avoid the common room.

 

Each time he sees a scarlet mark on the other person's neck exposed by a turn of the head or a shift of the shoulders, he tries to convince himself his throat doesn't get any drier and his chest doesn't feel any emptier.

 

\--

 

_Wardo, oh my God, Wardo, hello?_

He rubs his eyes and tries to get the 11:24 on his alarm clock to stop being blurry. He murmurs back into the phone, a lazy hello, because his body hasn't had nearly enough time to catch up with the panic his brain has already registered in Dustin's voice.

 

 _Wardo. Wardo. It's_ _–_ _oh my God, oh my fucking God_ _–_ _something happened._

Still tired and annoyed, he waits impatiently for further explanation.

 

 _Wardo_ _–_ _Wardo, it's Mark. He_ _–_ _oh my God, man. Mark is dead. He's dead._

Dread wakes him up faster than he expected, unsure whether to associate his dizziness with a head rush or what Dustin is telling him.

 

Because there is no way Mark is dead. Mark is twenty years old. Mark is the most brilliant person he knows. Mark hadn't been sick. He runs the possibilities over and over in his head, and they fail to add up. For the first time in his life, the numbers aren't adding up.

 

He's read sappy teenage cliches and listened to depressing British pop music about things like this all the time. He's heard people throw the idea around on a daily basis like it's nothing. He should be prepared for what happens next; it's idiotic that he isn't, really, and he'd beat himself up for it relentlessly if that weren't already Plan A.

 

 _Wardo,_ Dustin repeats, and he can hear the conflict in his voice, the urge to just hang up the phone and pretend he never had to make this call. _Mark killed himself two nights ago._

\--

 

A few years later, he'll finally feel ready to read the emails and listen to the messages he could never delete. He'll ask his assistant for the files he asked her to password protect long ago – pictures, random IM logs – and she'll actually give them to him. He'll scroll through and wonder how this person, this version of himself, could have ever distanced himself from Mark so suddenly. How, in years of learning Mark, attempting to understand him, forgiving him over and over, he had completely regressed in a matter of days.

 

And over what? Money?

 

He'll go through the pictures, the inside jokes, the horribly botched attempts at Photoshop that they'd send each other during lectures, and his memory of Mark will begin to rebuild itself again. He'll no longer be the Mark – cold and calculating to the very last second, choosing the quickest, most painless way to leave – who put a gun in his mouth on a crisp California night. He'll no longer be the Mark who was so alone that he went undiscovered for forty-eight hours, his programmers all convinced he was just on a code-producing bender.

 

Instead, he will become the Mark that tore himself away from the computer to listen to Wardo complain about his first B in Econ. He will become the Mark that listened, without speaking, when Wardo hadn't slept in a really long time and needed to rant about his dad and whether or not he really liked what he was doing with his life.

 

He is the Mark that would look at Wardo wordlessly, eyes bright and curious and knowing, and understand when he needed somebody. He is funny, sarcastic, annoying, brilliant, edgy _Mark_. Always agonizingly, infuriatingly, mind-boggling Mark, who put up so many walls and managed to carve a little bit of space out for his best friend. He is complicated and annoying as all hell and endearing and always so, so scared.

 

He is the Mark who kissed back.

 

\--

 

Chris and Dustin talk him into going to the funeral, attempt to appeal to the humanity left in him. They clutch at him for refuge and empathy and keep coming back with guilt, anger, loathing. He sees it start to wear on them. He wonders how long it will be before they're leaving him behind, too.

 

It's a very private affair, held on a crisp winter day at a cemetery within driving distance from Mark's parents' home. Wardo sits in the very back of the service, only to be prodded to the front by Mrs. Zuckerburg. Everyone in Mark's family keeps exclaiming at how wonderful it is to see him, how much Mark would have loved for him to be there.

 

Wardo wants them to spit at him, to blame him, to hit him in front of all these people. He wants them to understand that their sad, creative son didn't choose this. He wanted to explain that he'd done this to them.

 

He is asked to help throw dirt over the coffin, along with Dustin and Chris and Sean, and he doesn't even have the energy to be angry that Sean is treated like another one of Mark's friends. At least Sean had been on the same coast as Mark. Sean probably had Mark’s contact in his phone, his e-mail address saved. In a way, Sean had been there more than Wardo had in months, and it's enough to make him wish he were being lowered into the ground now, pelted with dirt.

 

The soil gets under his fingernails and all over the expensive Italian loafers his dad gave him just a few weeks ago. On the trip home, he picks at his fingernails until they bleed and leaves his shoes at airport security.

 

He goes home and drifts through work, slowly forgetting how to shave or sleep or eat. Chris, apparently not going anywhere, decides to move in with him for a while, and he doesn't object. He would never say it out loud, but being left alone with his own thoughts has slowly begun to kill him, and the effect is only compounded when he imagines that this is exactly how Mark must have felt.

 

Chris, as per the request of Wardo's mother, makes sure he eats and sleeps and shaves again. They go out on the roof and drink together when it's been a particularly rough day, and Chris doesn't say a word in the morning, although he must have been kept up for hours by the broken sobs coming from Wardo's door. Dustin will come at least once a week to watch absolutely shit TV with them and talk about nothing. Wardo doesn't want to believe it's helping, because he doesn't deserve for it to be, but some of the red is back in his complexion, and he's slowly transforming from scary skinny to just Wardo skinny. His dad pulls through, for once, and actually recommends a therapist for him.

 

Wardo deserves to be the one dead, not healing, but here he is.

 

\--

 

It's the night of the frat party, and he finally manages to finish his work before five a.m. for the first time in what feels like months. Drinking a whole glass of water and popping three Advil to prepare for tomorrow, he settles into bed, too lazy to change into pajamas, and looks grimly at his alarm, which is set for nine in the morning.

 

As he's about to drift off, he can vaguely see someone pause in his doorway. His eyelids flutter open and he turns on the lamp on his bedside table.

 

He can feel red rising prematurely into his complexion. It's Mark.

 

Mark stands there for a few moments, all darting eyes and tapping feet, before he clears his throat a little.

 

 _Uh, hey, Wardo, I just kind of wanted to talk to you, you know, about_ _–_ he makes a flailing hand gesture – _earlier._

Wardo tries to swallow the hot embarrassment creeping up in his throat. He can feel his skin flushing even more. He folds his hands on his lap and looks down on them fixedly, steeling himself against the imminent rejection.

 

 _Yeah, no, uh. You don't have to say anything else, I mean. I know where you're coming from, or whatever. We were both really wasted and it was just_ _–_ _yeah. Let's just forget about it._

 

Nothing in Mark's expression changes, but one of his hands curls into a fist. He shifts it to the pocket of his sweatshirt.

 

_Yeah. Right. Good idea._

Mark barely nods, a little tip of the head, before leaving the doorway to walk down the hall. 

**Author's Note:**

>  **trigger warning:** this is a suicide fic. it is meant to be depressing as all fuck as well as a piece that deals fairly bluntly with the ideas of depression, suicide, and death. honestly, please be warned, and if you're particularly susceptible to such ideas, do not read this. do not enable yourself. i promise you, it will not make you feel better.
> 
> \--
> 
>  **A/N:** i'm sorry.


End file.
